1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a special effect image generating apparatus for processing an image to generate a special effect.
2. Description of the Related Art
Processing original data for an image to give it a unique visual effect is a common practice in preparing television broadcast images and various other various. The types of image processing include “posterization” and “solarization” for reducing the number of gradients of the image data, “mosaic” processing for dividing an image to blocks of uniform densities, “mono” processing for making an image monochrome, “contrast” processing for adjusting the luminance difference of an image, and other various types of processing.
The special effect image generating apparatus of the related art performs the above variety of processing on an image as selected in an image conversion processing circuit. When doing this, it generates a mask pattern from a mask pattern generator to mask regions of the image not to be processed and used this mask pattern so as to process only predetermined regions of the image.
In the above special effect image generating apparatus of the related art, since predetermined positions of the image input to the apparatus were masked regardless of the state of the input image, when for example performing mosaic processing, the operator had to control the mask conditions to deal with any movement of the portions of the image to be masked accompanying movement of the input image. This adjusting operation required a lot of work.